Thursday, October 23, 2008

Savagepunk 2020

An aside: The "best" thing about Savage Worlds is how easy it makestitling blog posts. Just add Savage to front of things, or swap outwords for Savage. I'm so glad the game wasn't named "Buttweasel Worlds".

We used to have this MOC campaign... it was a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign withrandom craziness furnished via Morton's List. I loved that campaign,but it had one problem: the PCs had to be total freakin' cowards. Wewere a freakin' booster gang, and the sort of nutcases happy to puttheir lives in the hands of the Morton Boulder as a weeklysemi-religious experience - those characters shouldn't be cowards! Butwe were dirt poor gangers, and the CP2020 system isn't kind to thosewho can't afford armor, so we had to play cowards or die repeatedly. Wedidn't end up dying...

While talking today, Sarah and I lamentedthe passing of that game, and she mentioned that it bugged her that wewere such scaredy cats. In her experience, she maintains, CP2020 ain'tthat lethal. But she'd played mostly in high school, with power gamersand munchkins, where subdermal armor, skinweave, and metalgear wouldfrequently all end up on the same PC. Short of that kind of abuse ofthe layering system (which our poor gangers couldn't afford), headshots are nearly always lethal in CP2020, and 10% of hits areheadshots. Bravery gets you killed in Cyberpunk.

The otherproblem with CP2020 is how long it takes to build a character (PC orNPC). Even if you just need the random chombatta in an alley, he needscyberoptions, weaponry, and the SP values for every limb. It's a fun,gritty system, but it's a big pain in the ass to improvise.

Aswe discussed those truths, our eyes collectively lit up. Savage Worldscould get us back the MOC campaign concept without having to playcowards or deadmen. We've got recent experience with a very flexiblegeneric system, with low PC lethality and very simple NPC statimprovisation.

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